Phenomenology

Phenomenology (Gk., phainomenon, ‘that which appears’, + logos, ‘reflection’). The study of the ways in which appearances manifest themselves. The phenomenology of religion is thus the study of religious appearances; it may also embrace reflection on the nature of what gives rise to them. The term is used of endeavours to study religion, without commitment to the truth or otherwise of what is being studied, and with the suspension of value-judgements about the worth or otherwise of what is being studied. Such a wide understanding of the term allows many different styles of the study of religion to be called ‘phenomenological’. Whether any such value-free study is possible remains a matter of doubt—or at best of dispute.

The term was first used by J. H. Lambert in 1764, but with the completely different sense of the theory of appearance as one of four philosophical disciplines. As a term it appears e.g. in Kant and Hegel. In its more modern sense, it is particularly associated with the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). He was a pupil of Franz Brentano, and therefore began his work on the foundations of mathematics. Husserl began to realize not only that philosophers had failed to resolve the issue between solipsists and realists, but that it would make no practical difference to the lived and experienced world if they did so. Clearly, philosophical doubt must be driven further back: Descartes had thought that he had secured a foundation of certain knowledge in his cogito, ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’); but Husserl pointed out that the conclusion is not entailed; therefore he proposed that the only secure foundation of knowledge lies in the cogito: all that we can be sure of (and from this it is clear that Husserl remained a foundationalist despite some interpretations of his thought to the contrary) are cogitationes, appearances in consciousness.

In his later works (the most accessible of which are Cartesian Meditations, 1931, and The Paris Lectures, 1950), he argued that transcendental phenomenology ‘brackets out’ (epoche) all assumptions about existence, truth, and value, and analyses the cogitationes in terms of the stream of consciousness. But since consciousness is directed to what it takes to be an external world (or to its own past and future, etc.) through its Intentionalität (intentionality), it is legitimate to consider, perhaps even to infer, what may be a ground, in independence from consciousness, sufficient to give rise to the particular appearances in consciousness which happen to arise—especially when these arise with consistency. In this way, Husserl was able to return those degrees of reality to the world which the consistency of the data in consciousness seemed to require. Thus ‘you’ may appear in my consciousness with the consistency of a person whom I can label and name; I do not have to resolve the argument about solipsism before extending the intentionality of my consciousness toward ‘you’ as a consistent appearance in my own consciousness (i.e. I can bracket out the issue of whether you are truly there or not, or in what sense). Moreover, ‘you’ appear in my consciousness with the characteristic of marking off other appearances with an equal consistency, so that together we can label a world of appearances and name it—that is why Husserl called people ‘walking object indices’.

Through this process, it is possible to build up a world of intersubjective reliability without solving first the contentious philosophical issues of existence. An obvious candidate was the world of the natural sciences. At the very end of his life, Husserl realized that there is an extensive reliability in the world of theology (or more exactly of prayer and worship, etc.), and that his method required him to return a corresponding degree of reality to God.

Husserl's thought proved immensely fertile, both in philosophy (leading directly into existentialism) and in the study of religion. Virtually no phenomenologist of religion has ever followed a strictly Husserlian programme: words and indications are picked up from his thought, and are brought to bear in largely novel ways. Thus the early phenomenologists of religion were attracted by the prospect of identifying essences (understood loosely as identifying essential characteristics in religions or in religious beliefs and practices). This proved largely unilluminating, since it tended to squeeze an ocean into a thimble. Others seized on epoche and understood phenomenology to be description on the basis of which one might be able to enter empathetically into the phenomena being described. The most sophisticated attempt was made by Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950), in Phänomenologie der Religion (1933, tr. as Religion in Essence and Manifestation); he achieved brilliant insights, especially in the relation of religion to power, but in fact he made little attempt to bracket out his own assumptions.

Thus phenomenology has been a powerful influence, but the phenomenology of religion remains to be undertaken. As matters stand, phenomenology has transformed the study of religion in schools, colleges, and universities at the first level: it has ushered in the dispassionate (as opposed to confessional) teaching of religion, in a way which brackets out questions of whether e.g. God or gods ‘exist’: religions are studied as an important expression of human life. But the second level (as Husserl envisaged it, albeit in dense language) is always demanded by the first: given that these are the phenomena, what in reality has given rise to them, or brought them into being? The integration of the two levels has not yet been achieved.